Frequently Asked Questions (Project Owner)
Accounts
How do I add my ORCID ID to my FromThePage account?
Read this post for the steps.
How do we add a staff member to a project?
To add a staff member, they need to create their own FromThePage (transcriber) account. Once they have an account, you can add them as an owner.
Is it possible to set up an institutional account/collections rather than it being under my user name?
Yes. You can change the email and display name associated with your account by clicking on the "Sign in as..." in the top right, then "Your Profile", and "edit profile". To change the email you choose "login & password". Alternatively, if you have a service-style email you could create another account with that and we could move your collections to it.
There are at least two of us who need to log in to manage the projects. Should we make a general login and share the credentials or is there a way to add another user?
Have your staff create their own accounts and add them to your first collection as owners (right side of the settings tab). They’ll be able to manage that collection and it marks them as staff for your account, so they’ll be able to create new collections. They’ll receive the nightly status emails. The only thing they won’t be able to do is delete collections.
How do I delete my account?
If you sign in and go to "Your Profile/Username and password" there's an option to delete your account at the bottom.
Project Configuration
With the side-by-side view, is there a trick to making the rows easier to input content into? Is there a way to increase the depth of the table so that the first few rows are visible?
In your table configuration, make sure you set the default number of rows (generally to match your material). You need to set a number of rows to display in the spreadsheet configuration. (Step 8 here: https://content.fromthepage.com/spreadsheet-configuration/)
How to add a reviewer to a collection?
If review access is set to "restricted," you need to manually authorize reviewers. To do this:
- Go to the "Settings" tab in the collection.
- Navigate to the "Quality Control" section.
- Click "Edit Authorized Reviewers."
- Search for the user's email address and add them as a reviewer.
- Once added, they should be able to see the "Pages That Need Review" tab.
Can we add subject tags?
Yes, there are two ways to approach this:
- Upload a spreadsheet of subjects from the "Subjects" tab under the "Actions" menu. A sample spreadsheet is available once you click that option.
- Use "emergent" tags, which are created as users link them.
Is there a setting where for this project the first image of the uploaded work can be the featured image?
For the featured image, we grab one at random, but you can set the featured image by clicking on the title of the work, then “pages”, then finding the page you want and clicking “make featured image”.
How do you remove a value from one of the drop-down fields? What will happen if I remove an option that has been selected? Will those cells then be blank? The goal is to leave them blank rather than mark them Unknown.
The existing data will stay "unknown", so you'll still have "unknown" in your exports. If any of the already indexed pages are saved again, "unknowns" would become blanks.
If I move a column, will all the data already entered into it move with it? Or will that shift throw off the alignment?
Reordering columns should have no effect; the only issue is when you relabel them.
Transcription
How do I download the transcribed data from the tables? When I try to download, I only get metadata about transcriptions.
If you go to the “export all” (top choice on the export tab) you will have an option to download all the table data for the collection as a zip.
How do we integrate OCR with From the Page?
There are a couple of answers to that depending on where your OCR is now. If you're using CONTENTdm, you can just check the checkbox to pull it in when you import material. If you're uploading PDFs with a text layer, you can just check the checkbox to pull it in when you import material. If you're uploading zip files of images, you can create text files or TEI-xml files that match the image files' names. More information here. If you have IIIF manifests with your transcription as web annotations, we're working with the State Library of New South Wales to build an ingestion path, but it's not ready yet.
Is there a way to download the transcription line by line as it appears on the transcription screen? It would be helpful to have the transcription download with original line breaks.
You’ll find the type of export you want in the “export all works” (button on the top of the export screen); there’s a “verbatim plaintext” option that preserves the line breaks and hyphens.
Is there any easy way to add special characters on each transcription page? We might need to be creative, but most laptops and computers have different ways of allowing a user to make the symbol, so it's a bit complicated to explain to each transcriber how to do it.
What some of our other projects that use less common characters do is include those characters in the transcription conventions under the page and tell folks they can copy and paste from there.
Is there a way to prevent two people from working on the same document at the same time?
If two people are working on the same page at the same time, the last person who saves will overwrite the previous one. We attempt to avoid this by showing the 2nd transcriber a warning, "this page is being edited by another user!". If they do happen to overwrite, you'll be able to see both versions in the "versions" tab.
Is it possible to modify the size of the transcription box in relation to the image box?
There are several ways to enhance your experience with the image viewer. At the top of the image, you will find options to zoom in and out, reset the view, fit the image to the width, open in a new window, toggle full page, and rotate the image.
We recommend experimenting with these settings to find what works best for your needs.
We recommend experimenting with these settings to find what works best for your needs.
How do we transcribe cross-hatch letters with writing in multiple directions?
Transcribers should follow text and reading order. The image viewer includes rotate and zoom features to assist with readability. You can specify transcription conventions in the Help section of your collection settings.
Billing and Project Management
How does billing work?
We issue an invoice that can be paid:
- Through your accounting department via check or bank transfer, billing can be monthly (credit card only) or annually.
- Online via credit card
We're not sure of the volume of transcription at this stage. Is it possible to start on the researcher plan, and shift up a plan if we require more pages to be transcribed?
Absolutely. The key difference, other than page count, is that under the researcher plan you can only have a single collection. "Collection", in FromThePage, is the level that controls the configuration for the project. So if you want to do full text transcription of letters or diaries AND a spreadsheet indexing project of government records those would need to be two separate collections.
Is there an estimate for time to complete the project?
There are no guarantees on how long the project will be completed; however, to increase participation:
- We will promote your project in our monthly transcriber newsletter. You should also do local marketing, especially among people connected to your institution, location, or subject matter.
- Watch the Your First Crowdsourcing Video for insights on recruiting and retaining volunteers.
- We’re happy to discuss additional strategies with you.